Me: I regard Summorum Pontificum’s attempt to make the Extraordinary Form of the Mass (the one said in Latin as distinct from the Ordinary Form said in the local language of the congregation, for all you non-Catholics) widely available as a failed experiment that has only succeeded in enlarging a dangerous tumor in the Body of Christ. That tumor is the embittered nucleus of Traditionalist malcontents who have consistently weaponized the EF against the entirety of the Body of Christ, the Pope, and the human race. Therefore, the EF needs to end and the self-pitying Reactionaries need to decide whether they will attend the Ordinary form with the rest of us vermin they despise or if they too good for the Mass. Enough with this nonsense.
One of the many reasons I think the EF needs to go is that no matter how many times you point out the problem is not the EF but the antisemitic, racist, misogynist, schismatic subculture that has weaponized it is that the response of that subculture is never, “Could we be the assholes? Do we need to clean our own house and repent our abuses and the grave scandal and hurt we do to others?” Instead, it is always and forever “Why are you attacking the liturgy? Why do you hate the Mass?”
Yes. You got me. Clearly I hate the Mass. That is obviously what I am really saying.
Another reason I object to that subculture’s toxicity is revealed in the complaint of a reader who wrote:
Nothing would empower the SSPX and schismatics more than banning EF. Stop fighting liturgical culture wars. If you’re right that the problem is that the EF is being used as a totemic practice to question the post-conciliar authority of the church then driving it underground will deepen that problem. We need to depoliticise and normalise the EF otherwise it will continue to be used by schismatics for their own ends.
I reply: I don’t believe in negotiating with terrorists. Especially those marinating in self-pity. Offer only the OF. Let the sect decide if they love themselves more than the Mass. Enough nonsense.
He responds:
You cheapen your theology and your faith by talking about the 1000 year old liturgy our forefathers used as a bargaining chip for terrosits. That’s exactly what your opponents want. Do better.
Nothing would be better than for Pope Leo perform Pontifical High mass in the extraordinary form and use his homily for his strongest denunciation yet of the war in Iran.
And I reply: A sect whose first and only response to the war is “We won’t give a shit about mass death unless the pope caters to our finicky liturgical demands” is precisely why the fruits of this schismatic sect are evil and it should not be catered to one second longer.
My point is perhaps best illustrated in this story from 1 Kings:
Then two harlots came to the king, and stood before him. The one woman said, “Oh, my lord, this woman and I dwell in the same house; and I gave birth to a child while she was in the house. Then on the third day after I was delivered, this woman also gave birth; and we were alone; there was no one else with us in the house, only we two were in the house. And this woman’s son died in the night, because she lay on it. And she arose at midnight, and took my son from beside me, while your maidservant slept, and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead son in my bosom. When I rose in the morning to nurse my child, behold, it was dead; but when I looked at it closely in the morning, behold, it was not the child that I had borne.” But the other woman said, “No, the living child is mine, and the dead child is yours.” The first said, “No, the dead child is yours, and the living child is mine.” Thus they spoke before the king.
Then the king said, “The one says, ‘This is my son that is alive, and your son is dead’; and the other says, ‘No; but your son is dead, and my son is the living one.’ ” And the king said, “Bring me a sword.” So a sword was brought before the king. And the king said, “Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other.” Then the woman whose son was alive said to the king, because her heart yearned for her son, “Oh, my lord, give her the living child, and by no means slay it.” But the other said, “It shall be neither mine nor yours; divide it.” Then the king answered and said, “Give the living child to the first woman, and by no means slay it; she is its mother.” And all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had rendered; and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him, to render justice. (1 Ki 3:16–28)
I think of this story every time some Reactionary tells me that the Extraordinary Form of the Mass is just so infinitely superior to the Ordinary Form that all the vermin attend. I have never in in my life met an OF attendee who spends their time comparing and contrasting the OF Mass they attend to the EF. Nobody thinks about it. Nobody cares. The universal attitude of those who attend the OF is, “Go to the Mass you like.” If you prefer the EF, good for you. Whatever floats your boat.
But I can’t tell you how many times I have run into EF people who ring the changes on “I used to go to the OF, but it’s just so terrible and now my eyes are open to the glory of the true Mass and I will never go back! I don’t know what I would do if I had to attend the OF. Real Catholics celebrate the Traditional Mass!”
Casual blasphemy of the OF Mass (or as normal people call it, “the Mass”) is a constant feature of Reactionary piety. When the fruit of your super duper superior Trad piety is contempt for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and of the overwhelming majority of your fellow Catholics, you are not making a good case that the EF is doing Reactionaries any good. That, I repeat for the umpteenth time, is not the fault of the EF. It is the fault of the subculture that has weaponized it. If you would rather cut the Church in half than give up your idolatrous liturgical fetish that teaches you to use it as a sword to divide the Body of Christ, it should be taken away from you till you learn to love your neighbor more than your aesthetic obsessions.
Advertisement
10 Responses
As a 75 year old cradle Catholic, I remember the Latin Mass. It was no better than the current Mass in the vernacular. People daydreamed and thought of other things during Mass. Most people followed along in English anyway, because translations were in the pews anyway.
The idea that the Latin Mass was some sort of Heaven on earth is absurd. I was there.
I find the Latin Mass beautiful. But I strongly object to anyone telling me it is superior. It is no more superior than iced tea is superior to lemonade. I also find the French and Spanish Mass beautiful. And one of our local parishes even has a Burundian Mass.
Latin is not “God’s preferred language.” Latin is beautiful and has thousands of years of rich history and brilliant theology. But if you don’t actually speak the language, you’re like the beachcomber who has dipped his toes in the surf and thinks he has experienced the ocean.
If the pious really want to help the Mass, there are two things you could do that would have profound benefits for the Church:
One, get rid of the embarrassingly bad music. And I’m not only talking about the boomer praise leaders kumbayahing on their guitars. Yeah, that’s bad. But don’t neglect the blaringly bad organ music limping its way through hundred year old hymns written by Protestants. I know I am an old curmudgeon so a lot of this is just my own personal baggage, but I find the music in most Masses to be more torturous than uplifting. And the sad thing is: It is so unnecessary. Some of the best music ever written over the past 700 years was written for the Mass. Why are we settling for powdery mac and cheese when we could be enjoying gourmet food?
And two, our Initiation process for both kids and adults needs a ground-up re-do. Becoming a Christian is too much like going to the DMV, only with banter and balloons. People come to the Church hoping to experience the Living Christ. Instead they get shallow pamphlets and boring meetings and “let’s all split into groups and share our feelings.” I remember when I went through RCIA decades ago, I entered the Church mostly in spite of RCIA, not because of it. I can totally understand why so many of our young people especially go through the motions to please their parents then leave the Church the day after they leave home.
When I was a Latin Rite altar boy in the early 1960’s, we would say:
Latin is a dead language, and that’s as it should be.
First it killed the Romans, now it’s killing me.
“And yet, when Lefebvre stood before Pope Paul VI at Castel Gandolfo on September 11, 1976, the bomb-thrower suddenly became a delicate flower.”
Perfect. It pretty much puts the long and short of it in a nutshell.
Old Mass (vetus ordo, VOM) is not superior to New Mass (novus ordo, NOM). Language is actually the least of an issue because NOM can be and is celebrated in Latin and it should be the preferred language if there are attendees speaking many different languages because it establishes a common baseline for all.
The problem with VOM adherents is that they are lying and manipulating.
Is there inaccurate theology in NOM? Yes. Are there inaccurate translations from Latin to vernacular? Certainly. Does it make the Mass invalid? No, just like problems with VOM never made it invalid.
Can those inaccuracies be resolved? Absolutely. Would they require significant reforms? They might, which is why it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly — any such change should be thought out well. Would such reforms bring NOM closer to VOM? They actually might.
This is where VOM adherents should direct their energy. It would solve the problems that they claim to/ostensibly have with NOM. But that wouldn’t allow them to complete their other goals.
As an aside, the Council of Trent which established the Tridentine Mass which eventually evolved (!) and morphed (!!!) into VOM, sought to resolve four important problems with celebrating Mass:
1. How to make it universal across the entire Church?
2. How to respect local devotional practices while not allowing them to alter the core parts of the Mass, while considering what local practices should be incorporated universally.
3. How to remove all the magical thinking that accumulated over the years — mainly unnecessary and harmful additions — how to keep it in spirit with the Gospel (Matthew 6:7)
4. How to make it accessible, not just how to make it understandable to the flock (or indeed, the clergy), but also how to proceed with reforms so that local churches could afford to buy and use the books*.
The Tridentine Mass was revised many times and what was celebrated in 1962 already differed quite a bit from 1570.
If Mass is allowed to evolve, and it certainly evolved from how it was celebrated by Christ and later by the Apostles, and if Council of Trent had authority to do a liturgical reform, so did the Second Council of Vatican.
Hanging by a thread, trying to invent reasons why and how it did not have the authority to do so, is absolutely ridiculous.
And the Form is just an outwardly expression of what’s behind closed doors. It is subservient to other goals:
– Elitism: VOM adherents want to demonstrate how they’re superior to unwashed masses that attend NOM. Jesus warns against this in Matthew 23.
– Clerical supremacy: The clergy is superior to the laity. It’s “made from a different kind of clay”. The clergy is beyond the judgment of the laity and of secular courts and does not answer to authority other than ecclesial. When you consider how in some cases, clerics wouldn’t subordinate even to ecclesial superiors, it’s pretty clear what ends it serves.
– Control over the faithful. CV2 reforms paved way for the clergy losing their grasp of the flock. 1990 revision of the Catechism and putting good conscience ahead of every moral norm in determining sinfulness of actions resulted in losing it completely.
All of that is supported and indicated by the Form: specific vestments, specific roles, specific rituals. They were prescribed theologically and directed against magical thinking prevalent before Trent, but it lost all its theological significance when FSSPX disjoined itself from the Church. It became a form of cosplaying or reenactment of old rituals with no goal and became predominantly magical thinking.
Yes, a lot of people yearn for norms to be clearly spelled out, for somebody to have control over them and to feel superior to others by being part of an elite group. That alone explains why FSSPX has adherents and why it has proportionally more vocations than other parts of the Church. Every cult, every sect, has more active members than any established religion.
But it can’t grow without the Church. Nobody from the outside would accept it for what it is. It can only grow as a parasite feeding on the Church and stealing Her children.
And they don’t even have superior music 😉
*) This is actually a fascinating development of technology. It was already 100 years after Gutenberg printed the Bible, but book printing was relatively slow in its uptake. Printed books were an order of magnitude less expensive than manuscripts, but that meant that a missal would now cost a hundred cows instead of four villages. All the books necessary in a church would still cost too much to afford, and certainly way too much to replace. This was identified as the biggest obstacle to adopting the Tridentine Mass. The Church undertook significant work to take advantage of the economies of scale to lower book prices even further and increase production.
Contrary to what a lot of “Enlightenment” philosophers believed, printing was not a secular revolution and it weren’t the secular books that spearheaded the printing revolution. The Church immediately saw the benefits of printing (being the largest/virtually the only consumer of literature), but secular authority saw in it the danger of easily spreading ideas contrary to their monopoly on power and it was the secular authority that would try to suppress printing by imposing taxes.
And one more thing: Individual priests of FSSPX are already preparing for the schism. One preacher in Poland recently said that the encyclical of Leo XIV is the first anti-God encyclical, “placing humans on the throne of God”. That encyclicals promulgated by Francis were “full of errors”, but even they weren’t anti-God.
Those aren’t the first shots fired at the Church, but they are certainly aimed at their cult members who are being duped into thinking that Rome turned against God and that Rome strayed from the Church and it’s only right for FSSPX to abandon it and continue as the actual true Church.
So it’s absolutely going to get worse before it gets better.
If the story of the Leonine revelation is true*, then FSSPX was Satan’s attempted final blow against the Church. We can only pray that it doesn’t lead its members into condemnation.
*) Here’s a summary: Pope Leo XIII allegedly received a private revelation of what’s going to happen in the 20th century. Like in the Book of Job, Satan wagered with God that he can destroy the Church within a single century and God allowed Satan a single century of his choosing and he chose the 20th. Leo was supposedly so moved by that revelation that he wrote the prayer to archangel St. Michael and instituted it for the entire Church in defense of what was to come. With pope Leo XIV taking on that name, the revelation is coming to a close.
Leo XIII has never revealed that revelation fully and completely and the Church never took a position for or against. If the story is true, it would have certainly informed Leo’s actions, policies and writings. If it’s false, it doesn’t change anything and it doesn’t take away any meaning of his pontificate.
But because any supposed revelation was private, we don’t have a right to judge it and we’re not obliged to take any position. If it gives anyone hope, great. But it can be safely ignored — unlike the official teaching of the Church.
I confess I find it rather humorous that the Most Faithful Catholics of All Time are quickly turning into Protestants.
Neither for the first nor the last time.
That’s apparently the fervor that drives all Protestant schisms. Each one started with fervently defending the “true” faith as understood by the schismatic.
Such is the life of a Trad who actually attempts (however badly) to be faithful to the entirety of Tradition like yours truly: Treated like a fifth columnist by the reactionary trendsetters who think voting for Donald Trump taketh away the sins of the world, treated like a meaningless bit of collateral damage by those dedicated to fighting the reactionaries. Add to that my being high-functioning autistic and desperately needing to maintain a certain spiritual routine in order to NOT feel like God has abandoned me – a routine which, admittedly, could be adapted to worshipping in the Ordinary Form, but only if it’s done in the most traditional way possible (which, wouldn’t you know it, is exponentially harder to find than the Extraordinary Form) – and you get the perfect recipe for a continuing cycle of rage and despair. At moments like this, the prospect of simply throwing up my hands, kicking both the O.F. AND the E.F. to the curb, and either going back to the Ordinariate or switching to the Byzantine Rite sounds increasingly attractive.